


The Curious Case of Dr. James Barry, or the Strange and Momentous Events that Transpired on a Quiet Evening by the Fire.

by makaronik



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Coming Out, First Kiss, M/M, Partial Nudity, Queer History, Trans Male Character, Trans Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-09
Updated: 2020-06-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:54:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24617155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makaronik/pseuds/makaronik
Summary: Because of the biting cold outside we’d pushed the sofa as close to the fire as was safe, with me sitting at one end and him perched on the other. Wrapped in his dressing gown he once again reminded me of a bird, perhaps one of those commonly thought of as omens of strange and momentous events.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 94





	The Curious Case of Dr. James Barry, or the Strange and Momentous Events that Transpired on a Quiet Evening by the Fire.

**Author's Note:**

> There aren't nearly enough trans Sherlock fics, and even fewer featuring queer history, so I wrote my own.

It was still early in the evening, but Mrs. Hudson had already retired for the night. I still had some time before I would usually feel tired, and hours yet would pass before Holmes would even consider going to bed. Because of the biting cold outside we’d pushed the sofa as close to the fire as was safe, with me sitting at one end and him curled up at the other. Wrapped in his dressing gown he once again reminded me of a bird, perhaps one of those commonly thought of as omens of strange and momentous events. 

I was reading, or at least trying to, since my friend’s behaviour was extremely distracting, especially when sitting so close. He was restless, almost as much as in the long stretches of time between cases, filled with cocaine and pointless experiments, and every time he shifted suddenly the sofa would shake making me lose my place on the page. Once in a while he would fall completely still, staring off into the fire, or the ceiling, and more than once straight at me, which proved even more distracting than his squirming. He was clearly lost in his thoughts, and his cigarette kept dropping worryingly close to the embroidered cushion next to him until he’d suddenly snap out of his stupor, only to resume his erratic movements once more. 

He was alternating between his pipe and cigarettes at an alarming rate, but i wasn’t willing to break the homey atmosphere with another lecture about hygienic living, especially since something was clearly troubling him. I tried to concentrate on the text in front of me again, but my eyes kept drifting off to follow the swirling trajectories made by the glowing tip of his cigarette, hoping to prevent a fire should he get distracted again. I finally gave up and put my book away after he accidentally poked me in the leg while shifting positions twice in one minute. But before i managed to ask him to either share what was bothering him or let me read in peace he cut me off and said the absolute last thing i could have expected. 

“Well, Watson. It has become clear to me that you are as interested in me as i am in you, however before we can actually do anything with that information there is still a small matter we must discuss.”  
He said it in a calm voice, as if he didn't realise my entire world had just turned upside down. I’d hoped, or perhaps fantasized is the more accurate word, that we might one day have this conversation, but I'd long since concluded that he must know how I feel about him just as surely as he knows which patients I saw on any given day from just one glance when I return home, and if he hasn’t acted on it yet, that must mean he isn’t interested in any kind of romance, whether with women or men. Whenever he showed the signs I might have interpreted as interest in any other man I just attributed them to his general queerness, and our strong friendship. I tried to answer but no reply would form in my head and all that came out was:  
“I… how... ”  
My stammering gave me some time to consider the situation with a less emotional lense. His words had been shocking, but he certainly wasn’t wrong, and he’d clearly been considering how to word this the entire evening. If the matter he wished to discuss was important enough to cause his strange behaviour I wasn't about to rush him. Like many times before I decided to simply follow his lead. Thankfully he took my silence as a sign to continue and promptly took the conversation to another unexpected topic, at first glance entirely unrelated to the one at hand.

“I assume you’ve heard of doctor James Barry.”  
“Of course, I am very familiar with his work,” I replied, my voice a touch less stable than I would have liked.  
“While his work was certainly very important, it is not the reason i mentioned him. What is relevant to our discussion today is the scandal he caused.”  
I assumed he wasn’t talking about his famously volatile temper, and said  
“I have heard the rumors that he enjoyed the company of men, yes.”  
I wondered why he was bringing him up at all. perhaps he’d taken my lack of reaction to his confession (or accusation, depending on how you looked at it) as confusion and was trying to explain the very concept of homosexuality to me. I was faintly amused by the idea that this man with his incredible skills of deduction hadn’t seen the long line of male lovers in my past from the way I fold my handkerchief or some other fleeting detail. Especially when paired with the natural ability to spot each other in a crowd that men of our inclination possess. I was forced to consider for a moment if the emotions he was trying to express towards me had clouded his usually impeccable judgement, but that didn’t seem very likely.  
Even if it were so, there were dozens of men more notorious for such an inclination he could have used as an example, one of whom had written the very book i’d been reading mere moments ago, although his revelation had already made it seem like another lifetime entirely. 

“The doctor, before his death, had left a last request,” he continued after a short pause. “After he died his body was to be wrapped in his bedsheets and buried like that without any further examination.  
“An unusual request,” I said. “But scandalous isn’t the word I would use.”  
This was something we did often, him telling me a strange, but true story from the past, leaving short breaks for my pointless (but necessary for the narrative, he always insisted) interjections. I was glad that even though our world had been shifted immensely by the short sentence that had started this conversation, it still felt familiar. When fantasizing about this moment in the past i’d often feared it would be a sort of end to our life up to this point, now i realised it had just opened a path towards a new beginning. I would have liked to begin us on that path, but he was determined to continue the storytelling.  
“Ah, but the story doesn’t end here. You see the doctor had a secret, one he’d hoped to quite literally, carry with him to the grave. And since his wishes weren’t respected this secret was discovered.”

Listening to sordid tales of the potential physical deformities of such an esteemed member of my profession had certainly never featured in my fantasies, but I was sure Holmes had a point, however buried in his convoluted reasoning, and that he was going to get to it sooner or later.  
“The army has since endeavored to hide this information, however I was lucky enough to stumble upon a newspaper from the time, detailing the events.”  
This seemed unlikely, one didn’t just stumble upon something the army was actively hiding, but I was getting impatient and wasn’t about to allow Holmes to ramble away into a tangent about his investigation methods.  
“I admit his story holds a personal significance to me.” Here he paused, taking a few drags of his cigarette, and I was beginning to think he wouldn’t continue at all before he spoke again, in a slow and measured tone looking directly into my eyes, the way he did when interrogating a suspect.  
“You see it turns out dr Barry’s anatomy was one most commonly considered to be female.”  
He’d worded it in such a strange way I felt the need to clarify.  
“You mean he was a woman, disguised as a man?” I asked.  
“No Watson, he was a man, disguised by nature in the body of a woman,” he replied immediately, as if he’d practiced that sentence beforehand.

My memory travelled back to my time in the army, where I had met a woman disguised as a soldier. She'd approached me to ask for my help as a doctor, with a rather sensitive problem, clearly as a last resort. I'll never forget the way her eyes kept darting between me, the door, and her revolver as she waited for my reaction. It was startling how much my friend’s expression in this moment mirrored hers. I'd helped her, and kept her secret and we’d remained friends till she retired not long before me, no doubt because she saw me as one of the few people in the army she could fully trust. We’d lost touch since but i had learned that she went on to marry another soldier from our regimen after her service was over. Maintaining such a ruse until one’s death seemed to border on the impossible, and I couldn’t begin to understand why anyone would even attempt it.

“I'm not sure I understand,” I said, when it became clear he was waiting for my reaction.”Besides, what does it all have to do with the topic at hand?”  
It was becoming clear to me that he was getting closer to the true meaning of this story but was for some reason reluctant to get to the point. The words „a personal significance to me” were rattling away at the back of my mind, clearly important but seemingly unwilling to take hold and lead to a conclusion.  
“Do you really need me to spell it out for you,” he said, instead of answering. “Have I taught you nothing?”  
“Well, one obvious conclusion jumps to mind, but I am afraid of offending you.”  
“You know I’m not one to take offence with the truth.” He used that same exasperated tone, usually reserved for times my deduction on a case was (at least to him) slow.  
“Well in that case… It would appear you are trying to convey to me-” apparently it was now my turn to beat needlessly around the bush “-that-” I searched my mind for the exact words he had used before “-nature has disguised you in the body of a woman as well.” The very notion seemed absurd to me. My mind couldn't accept it as the truth, so I was looking for any other motive he could have to make me believe it.  
“And?” He asked, in the same manner as when he was leading me to a conclusion, walking me through his process.  
“And what?”  
“And were that true, how would you react?”

I was starting to think he regretted his earlier confession and was trying to lead me away from the topic entirely, so I decided to treat this strange discussion like another lesson in deduction.  
“Well i suppose i would find it difficult to believe without some proof.” After I said this, he turned his head towards the fire and stared at it, lost in thought again, as if he was trying to find a solution to an unsolvable problem. When the silence dragged on I grew impatient.  
“Is it true, or is this just another one of your mental exercises,” I said brusquely. “Is this a case you’re trying to solve, by testing out some strange theory on me”  
“It’s not for a case,” he said, his voice smaller than I’d ever heard it before.  
“Then what, pray tell, is the point of all of this.”  
I am ashamed to admit I raised my voice, but the life changing admission of our mutual feelings for each other and his subsequent complete avoidance of the topic had me on edge. my mind was entirely ignoring the other revelation he was trying to make. The idea that the man in front of me could in any way be a woman seemed too far fetched. He'd never shown any interest in them besides the professional. It was hard to even imagine him having a mother. In my mind he’d sprung fully formed from the London smog like Venus from sea foam, perhaps not very manly but undeniably a man. I couldn’t find any association between him and women in my memory, the only exception his fascination with Irene Adler, though that still fell under profesional interest. But that could be the point. "Isn’t lack of data a kind of proof in and of itself?" Whispered a voice in my head that sounded a lot like him.

“I think you’re right.” This time he broke the silence. “I’m the one always saying that proof is most important, so let’s start with that.”  
And then he started undressing. Clearly his mood had shifted from the earlier sluggish introduction of the topic, since his movements were firm, almost hasty.  
When he was left in his undershirt and trousers a sudden realization hit me. Despite the frequent medical help I had provided him through the years, despite our many visits to the turkish baths, and despite his penchant for walking about the house at all hours of the night in various states of undress i had never, not even once, seen his naked chest. I'd never noticed before but now it seemed highly improbable for it to be a coincidence. As he removed his undershirt it became clear why. Underneath he was wearing a brassiere, of the type that had been becoming more and more popular in recent years, so much so that even I, with no interest in women’s fashion had managed to retain its shape from the few advertisements I’d seen in papers, and even fewer encounters with actual women I’d found time for since beginning my work with Holmes. It had clearly been adjusted to his unique needs, intended to flatten the chest completely, but i didn’t have much time to examine it because after a slight hesitation he was already unbuttoning it.

Uncertain how I could approach this situation as his friend (and potential lover my mind supplied unhelpfully) I focused instead on understanding what I saw as a doctor. He had breasts. That much was undeniable, but they didn’t look anything like those you see on overweight men. In fact I was beginning to suspect his irregular eating habits and subsequent thinness, which i had chastised him about so many times weren’t entirely, as he’d led me to believe, the result of his indifference towards his health and body, but a conscious effort on his part to reduce his chest. On the other hand, his body didn’t look like any woman I'd ever seen. His waist didn’t curve in sharply in that recognizable way, caused by wearing corsets from early adolescence, specific to European women. His shoulders were perhaps narrower than those of an average man of his height, but not by much and his arms and torso were undeniably those of a boxer. It was the muscles in his arms that made me blush remembering the start of this strange conversation, (and the future in which I might touch them without a bandage in hand that had suddenly opened before me) and certainly not the small breasts. My eyes had been slipping off of them all this time as if my mind was unwilling to accept that they were part of him but I forced myself to focus. They were flattened, probably by decades of wearing such restrictive clothing, and around his ribs i could see faint red marks, nearly identical to those left on his cheeks by a pillow, when i sometimes found him fast asleep on the couch late in the afternoon after a sleepless night, and the urge to kiss them that took over me was as strong as always.  
It was at this point that i realized i was staring, and i had been for quite a bit longer than i should have, though in my defence, no etiquette lesson came even remotely close to covering what one should do in this situation.

Holmes had been drawing in deep breaths all this time, presumably to compensate for the time his lungs had been restricted, but suddenly he turned away, threw on his dressing gown in an instant and went to roll a cigarette, with his back still turned.  
I now realised that tobacco probably wasn’t the only source of the worrying coughs he got sometimes, and guilt pierced my heart as i remembered all the times he’d brushed me off after i had chastised him, when he must have known the true reason. If only he’d told me, I could have helped him, I thought. Helped him how? I asked myself sardonically, but an answer was already brewing in my mind.

He sat back down on the sofa and handed me one of the cigarettes, lighting the other in a practiced move. While I fumbled to light my own he watched me expectantly and I could see in his eyes that his full attention was on me. The calculations that constantly went on in the back of his mind had quieted entirely. It would have been terrifying, having this brilliant mind concentrated only on me if it weren’t for the fear I could see in his eyes.  
I realised I would have to speak soon, but no adequate words came to mind.

After taking a long drag of the cigarette the mind of Watson the man was still blank, so Watson the doctor stepped in again.  
“I could... that is if you wanted me to, I could remove them.”  
For a second I feared this might be the worst thing I could have said. He shared with me his secret and my first suggestion was to amputate that part of him. I hoped he wouldn’t interpret it as disgust towards his body because what I felt was anything but. Confusion maybe, and a fair bit of professional fascination, both overshadowed by the want i had come to associate with seeing him, only made wilder by his nakedness and our potential relationship that I was hoping we might actually come around to discussing soon.  
But then I saw his expression change, a smile splitting his face, so bright i had no choice but to respond to it with my own. This man, usually so guarded with his emotions, was beaming like a child, because I'd suggested he go through a painful surgery. He would never cease to confound me. 

“I have of course considered it before,” he said, still smiling, “but I've never been in a situation where it would be even close to possible. When you moved in I was ecstatic. A surgeon living in my house, a surgeon I've since come to trust with my life... It made finally being rid of them seem more possible than ever before, but of course your feelings for me made asking for it complicated.”  
I was livid. I considered saying something childish, along the lines of “I’m very sorry if my feelings made it complicated for you to get what you want.” Part of me was starting to consider that this entire conversation had been a way to manipulate me into this very result, but i wasn’t sure if this part of me was being irrational or if it was the one hoping it wasn’t true. I saw his bright smile slowly fading as he assessed my face, and wondered, like many times before, how much of my thoughts he could read. I remember how vulnerable he’d looked this entire evening, the honest fear in his eyes, and realised that if i made any of his fears come true in this moment i would never forgive myself. Besides, hope was almost always a better route to follow than anger.

“Holmes. What about your feelings for me?” I was surprised by how tired my voice sounded and I think he was too, since it was the first time that night that he found himself at a loss for words.  
“My feel-” he stuttered, “Watson, I’ve already told you!”  
“No you haven’t. You’ve implied, and that’s not the same. I'm going to need something more. You have to remember that unlike you I can never be certain what someone else is thinking.”  
He looked a bit embarrassed and i half expected him to go on one of his speeches denouncing emotions, like he usually did to avoid dealing with them, but instead he did yet another entirely unexpected, life changing thing, and i’d already lost count of them by that point in the evening, but now i lost my wits entirely.

He climbed into my lap and kissed me.

Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective, in fact the greatest detective in all of history, who apparently had breasts, and who was, I was just now realizing, the love of my life, climbed into my lap, with the same effortless grace he always moved with, threw himself at me with a passion I’d only seen him show for the most gruesome of murders before, and kissed me.  
I kissed him back purely on reflex because my mind was in a hundred places at once, only a small part remaining to admire the glorious event taking place on our old sofa. I was considering countless possibilities, suddenly granted sight into infinite futures. The simple path that lead to our bedroom, the more complex to a hotel room somewhere in the south of France. Endless fleeting glimpses of a squeeze of our hands while laying in wait for a suspect in some dark place, or a kiss on the cheek in a dead end alley, breathless after a chase, and finally some nonsensical vision of Holmes in a beekeeper’s hat, flicking back his veil in a delightful parody of a bride, revealing a face wrinkled by age, but not by sorrow, and laughing as he licked honey of my face.  
I wondered deliriously if this was how he felt all the time, if perhaps his closeness had infected me with some semblance of his bright intellect, and I began to understand why he sometimes described it as a curse, but if this was the price i had to pay for touching him... Of course! Touching him! My train of thoughts trailed off as I did just that, slipping my hands under his robe and pressing him as close to me as I could, my fingers fitting perfectly between his bony ribs.

When we finally broke apart he didn’t pull away, instead collapsing his entire weight on me, and resting his chin on my shoulder. His breasts pressed into my chest but I was too busy tracing the muscles of his back and the scars that ran across them to think about that.  
“I do care about you Watson,” he whispered suddenly, right into my ear “I care for you more than I ever have another person. Although I think you already knew that.”  
“I suppose I did. It’s still nice to hear you say it.”

He probably felt safer, saying it to the room behind me instead of having to look into my eyes, but with the fire warming us up, his weight pressing me down into our couch, his hair tickling my neck and his chin digging into my shoulder, I wouldn't have it any other way.

**Author's Note:**

> I haven’t read any of the books in almost a decade so apologies if anything from the adaptations snuck in. It was really fun writing in this style but i admit that english isn’t my first (or second actually) language so i apologize for any awkward sentences, and also americanisms. 
> 
> I was hoping to shove some actual Wilde references in there because i’ve finally started reading his stuff but then i went and wrote this entirely in two nights, edited on a third and here it is. My first fic (well first published, i have a good omens wip i’ve been working on for almost a year).  
> However, there are a few paragraphs of Watson’s internal rambling i cut from this so that might make it into a part two.
> 
> I’m on tumblr @transmalewife


End file.
